The Cutter Consortium's annual Summit,
held in Cambridge, Mass. on October 25-27, provided its usual
succession of deep and spirited conversations about IT
strategies.
Rob Austin (Chair,
Harvard Business School CIO Executive Education program, and
Professor of Managing Creativity and Innovation at the Copenhagen
Business School), said as he introduced the Summit that "we've just
lived in 'interesting' times" and that the renewed emphasis on IT
cost cutting is the "revenge of the accountants." Later on, Rogelio
Oliva (also ex-HBS, now teaching at Texas A&M) led a case study
in which, indeed, management looks at IT costs first before even
thinking about IT's value.
Cloud computing was examined from several
angles. Lou Mazzuchelli
debunked some myths in his keynote, claiming that the utility
metaphor is flawed. But the cloud exposes the fact that IT's
strategic value is no longer in servers or applications, but in
data. Therefore, "data governance" is becoming critical, and "data
risk" is a key issue in the cloud. This point was reinforced (and
perhaps exaggerated) during the ensuing panel, especially by
security expert Andy Fried. Lou
also looked at the one-sided fine print concerning data recovery in
Amazon's EC2 agreement.
Jim Highsmith's
keynote on Agile Leadership reminded me of past discussions about
why a traditional IT organization often seems unable to provide a
rapid response to changing business needs. "People are so used to
'plan-do' that they have a lot of difficulty moving to
'envision-evolve'." Some people learn the basic rules of agility,
but don't go past the basics. "Traditional managers expect projects
to be on track early and off-track at the end; agile managers
expect the opposite."
Robert Scott,
former VP of Innovation and Architecture at Procter & Gamble,
gave a fascinating, candid and often humorous account of their
8-year journey to create a successful Shared Services organization.
This resulted in outsourcing 6,000 people, but also had a profound
and positive transformative impact. For example, P&G's new
Global Business Services division is now a provider of project
management services to the entire company; and IT was renamed
"Information and Decision Solutions," which got rid of the often
misleading "T" word.
Following a keynote by Bob Benson on "IT
Governance in Tough Times," a panel on business/IT strategies
focused on the existence of shadow IT organizations in lines of
business, why this is the case, and how to deal with
this.
Vince Kellen, CIO
of the University of Kentucky, led a breakfast roundtable on
"social media and its business effects." He pointed out that the
people who are in charge of marketing and competitive intelligence
are typically not those from the generation that is the most
comfortable with social media, even though they might be the ones
who benefit most.
Parallel half-day workshops filled the
third day of the Summit. Mike Rosen used a
case study format to depict the customer-centric enterprise
architecture journey of Wells Fargo, including their use of SOA, in
"How Architecture Has Resulted in Competitive Leadership." I led an
interactive workshop entitled "Cloud Computing: Hype, Fear, Reality
and Pragmatics." Rob Austin led a "CIO and IT Managers Forum," Israel Gat and Jim Highsmith
led one on "Technical Debt Assessment: the Science of Software
Development Governance," and Mitch Ummel helped
close the event with his workshop on "The Changing Face of
Government IT: E-Gov Trends and Opportunities."
Please
contact Claude Baudoin if you're interested in more
information about any of these topics.
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